[mpich-discuss] ROMIO with SGI MPI MPI_TYPE_MAX

[burlen]

Hi All,

I have been running into some issues when using SGI MPI and collective 
IO. My program always crashes with the error

    MPI has run out of internal datatype entries.

It's quite quick with the default 8192, upping the value does prolong 
the life of the program but it will still crash after about 300 ish type 
commit/read/type free operations. Which to me doesn't seem like a very 
large number for an HPC app.

Also I have found a way to reproduce this after only two explicit type 
commit in my application. There are some point to point communication as 
well but none of them commit any types. And we're talking about only a 
handful of MPI calls issued. This reproduction depends on how many 
process per node are scheduled , eg 1 per core. I have been careful to 
see that I'm not leaking types, so my conclusion is that SGI MPI is 
leaking types internally.

I was surprised to see a blurb about just this issue in ROMIO user manual.

Can anyone out there shed some light on this?

Thanks
Burlen

• When using ROMIO with SGI MPI, you may sometimes get an error message 
from SGI
MPI: “MPI has run out of internal datatype entries. Please set the 
environment variable
MPI TYPE MAX for additional space.” If you get this error message, add 
the following line to
your .cshrc file:
setenv MPI TYPE MAX 65536
Use a larger number if you still get the error message.